We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Lytle a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

My entrepreneurial journey started almost by accident when I was 13. I wanted to create a YouTube channel, but instead of launching it, I became obsessed with designing its branding and spent hours tinkering in Photoshop, trying to make everything look just right. What started as a hobby quickly became my first business.

Over the years, my hunger to learn and be curious pushed me to explore everything—from website design and UI/UX to print design, logo design, and even videography. I just wanted to be a swiss army knife and be as helpful as possible to any company I worked with.

Everything truly clicked for me when I had the opportunity to create a 10-foot banner honoring our high school’s hockey legacy. Seeing something I designed on my laptop come to life on such a massive scale was incredible. That banner still hangs in the rink today, and is a constant reminder of how any form of creative work can leave a lasting impact.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I spent eight years running my freelance brand design business, learning everything I could about creative problem-solving and working with clients. Then, in college, I had an opportunity to take things further.

During sophomore year I was running the marketing club that I had started, and connected with another Babson student, Jake Ross. He had just created his own marketing agency and was hiring. What started as a casual introduction turned into joining his agency, and together, we scaled fast. Over two years, we worked with more than 40 clients and learned so much along the way.

But to really make a difference, we decided to niche down this winter from being a full-service agency. We realized our biggest differentiator is our knowledge of LinkedIn’s algorithm. Today, we focus entirely on creating LinkedIn content for founders, companies, and executives.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Our focus on quality over quantity. A lot of people think posting as much as possible is the answer, but we’ve found that limiting our clients to a maximum of three posts a week works best. It’s all about being authentic, and not trying to batch-write 30 posts in week 1 of the month. Our team has collectively written over 1,000 posts, and have learned what hooks grab attention, what imagery performs best, and how to keep people engaged throughout the entire post.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The best part is seeing the impact of what we create. Sure, we analyze the data and work to improve post performance, but it’s the small wins that stick with me. Like when a client gets a heartfelt message saying their post inspired someone. Those moments remind me why we do this. We are creating a tight-nit community of people around their personal brand.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thebuildyou.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-lytle-build-you/